ROY HATTERSLEY: Why closing local libraries is a tragedy for us all

Forty public libraries closed last year - the victims of local government cutbacks.

But last Saturday afternoon in Hillsborough Park, in the north of Sheffield, books were being withdrawn with the same enthusiasm that borrowers felt 60 years ago.

I know what that library meant to people who - in that less self-confident age - longed to read but would did not dare to go into a bookshop.

From the age of five until I was judged old enough to make the pilgrimage on my own, I was taken there every Thursday evening by my mother and father.

Much has altered.

But the importance of public libraries - even in this new sophisticated age - has not changed.

They still provide essential information, informal education and, most important of all, hours of pure pleasure.

The are two libraries in Hillsborough Park. One is in what once was Hillsborough Hall - a late 18th century mansion which was the home of Joseph Rodgers, a Sheffield cutler whose factory proclaimed, through a message picked out in its roof tiles, King of Knifemakers and Knifemakers to Kings.

The other - housed in an obviously interwar extension - provided my first experience of book borrowing.

Over the door the notice reads "Junior Library".

In the age of Biggles books and Just William stories, we called its patrons "children".

Much to my delight, the staff did the same last week.

But, in almost every other way, the attitude towards the young readers is different.

In my day, there were books on the shelves and not much else, except the feeling that we could take them or leave them. Now, the library reaches out.

Children born in many areas such as Sheffield receive - or the new mother receives on his or her behalf - a pack of books suitable for parents to read to their infant.

Eighteen months later, a second gift arrives - more books in a satchel of the sort that two- and three-year-olds might take to nursery school.

And parents can take home (in the way they might "withdraw" a book) what is called an "age bag".

Age bags are filled with all sorts of teaching aids and reading incentives, designed to capture the interest of one-, two- or three-year-olds.

But, in the end, it is the influence of home that really makes the difference. Mathew Lockley, aged four, starts school tomorrow.

He was in the Junior (or Children's) Library with his father last Saturday afternoon.

Their normal habit, John Lockley said, was for one parent to look for books for the adults in the family while the other helped Mathew to make his choice.

It was the same with us 50 years ago. The trick is to make reading a habit.

Rory Thompson, a bright-eyed eight-year-old, was in the main library with his mother.

He had selected, from a shelf of paperback cartoon books, a slim volume with the title Write Your Own Myth.

Mystified by his choice, Mrs Thompson suggested that he change it for an account of the Black Death.

She thought that a horror story would attract him.

But he said that he also "wanted something about Shakespeare" and he reluctantly accepted his mother's explanation that there was a limit on the number of books they could take out at any one time.

It is one of the few restrictions that remain.

Most of the old prohibitions - no babies, no talking and only two out of the three borrowed books allowed to be fiction - have gone.

Just after the war the municipal library was a forbidding place.

Like the workhouse up the hill, it was supposed to make people better, not happy.

Now - at least at Hillsborough - the staff go out of their way to meet the borrowers' needs and wishes.

Teenagers - who apparently like to be called "young people" - can borrow CDs, like books, after trying them out on a player in what used to be the reference room.

There is often a queue at the free internet screens.

And the real books are classified under easy-to-recognise headings.

So Brenda Callaghan - a Dick Francis and Maeve Binchy enthusiast - and Linda Maughan, who visits the library about every three weeks and takes out three books, know exactly where to look.

So did Joshua Philpott, who read the morning papers before moving on to the "travel" and "local" sections.

I followed Philpott's lead and found that one irritating feature of Hillsborough library persists.

Casual readers still return books to the wrong shelves. At least I hope they do.

For in the "local" section I found Legends Of Blood.

Many other things have altered. In the foyer, a couple were locked in a passionate embrace.

That would not have been allowed - or, indeed, attempted - in my time.

The mulberry tree, which bore fruit for years, has gone from the grass in front of the main door.

But one fact about local libraries is the same. They bring immeasurable pleasure to people of every type, class and age.

Yet 40 closed last year. What happens in Hillsborough shows what a tragedy that is.